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My Great Grandparent’s Farm-

One of these days I’m gonna buy my great grandparent’s farm house & land and live the rest of my life there at…The Old Blackburn Place.

The front porch used to wind around the side to the back where there was an old well right on the back porch for water before they installed indoor plumbing. I can remember many a day running and playing on that old porch. I was always drawing water out of the well in an old wooden water bucket that i’m sure my great grandfather had fashioned out of a log. My cousins and I played there for hours. We never tired of pretending we were living there back in the old days.

I don’t remember my great grandparents Roscoe & Dashia Blackburn. They both passed away when I was just a year old. Papa passed first, leaving his wife and best friend of 50 some years. With his passing she didn’t last long. She was so distraught she passed away 3 weeks later from what most said was a broken heart. They were inseparable in life and then in death. They married young, never leaving each others side for all of their 50 some years together.

She was the first one up every morning before the chickens. She woke up the roosters to do their job of waking up the rest of the farm. She cooked from an old wood cook stove that was still in the house when I was little. Winter or summer, hot or cold she would fire up the wood cook stove to start Papa’s breakfast way before anyone or anything was up a stirring. Drawing water from the well on the back porch for the coffee, going out to the chicken house to gather eggs freshly laid to fix for breakfast, then stopping on her way back to the house to milk the cow for fresh cream for the coffee and a cake of bread. She did more before the sun came up than most do today all day long. That’s why women were strong back then. They knew what hard work was, not one bit afraid of it and took pride in being the best wife & mother.

Papa would be up by the time she made it back to the kitchen from her morning chores. Dressed in his faded worn overalls, he walks towards the kitchen being drawn to the smell of the fresh coffee boiling on the stove all the way from the bedroom. He grabs a tin coffee cup out of the cupboard on the right as he enters the kitchen. Looking over to the stove, he sees the iron skillet with eggs frying with a big juicy piece of fatback. He crosses the room to the stove that had the kitchen quite warm and smelling delicious with aromas from the top and the oven. He pours his coffee from the old coffee pitcher that had been handed down to them when they got married.